


The Venture

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 13:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2814017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another Mycroft/Lestrade first time Mystrade. This time I'm just playing with the matter of both men being mature, solid, reserved in many ways, no longer young... As shown, they have a number of personality traits that would make "romance" difficult for them. It's undigified and it requires you take risks that seem a bit insane, and you have to let go of control, and you have to indulge when you've spent a life-time resisting indulgence.</p><p>So, thanks to the Patron Saint of Overly Adult Lovers, Mycroft's given a bit of a push to start the dominos cascading.</p><p>I hope to get the next Advent up tomorrow, but do have an assignment. So--enjoy this in the meantime.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Venture

Mycroft was sitting in his customary chair at the Diogenes club reading the papers when he received the message. It came with the hot buttered rum he ordered: a little, neat envelope with the corner tucked just under the steaming mug. He accepted his drink, and arched a brow at the waiter.

The waiter shrugged, silently, and looked pointedly down at the little white rectangle with Mycroft’s name written boldly across it in a neat and positively antique hand.

Mycroft nodded, placed his mug on a coaster on the little table by his chair, and picked up the envelope, studying it as the waiter evaporated silently back into the background, just as a good Diogenes staff cipher ought.

Mycroft Holmes, the letters said. Or, more precisely, **Mycroft Holmes**

Mycroft set the envelope on the side table and pondered, sipping delicately at his drink. He savored the heat and the sweetness and the burn of the rum even as he considered the puzzle of the envelope. After a time he put his mug down, picked the envelope back up, and opened it.

Inside was a neatly folded card, much like the "thank you" stationery his mother had kept on her desk when he was a child, back in the final days before the world of manners fell apart entirely, and even Mummy gave up on keeping her desk properly stocked with appropriate stationery. The texture was fine—firm and crisp, but not too heavy. He flipped it open.

**Venture your heart and wager your pride--the victory lies in the daring. Be no less bold than your dearest dream.**

He scowled. If he had not been in the Diogenes, he’d have sworn. Indeed, he’d have invested a small amount of creative effort to have sworn with style and panache.

Whatever was that about? It was like a fortune in a fortune cookie written by some drunken cupid—feathers all in disarray, humming maudlin love songs. He scoffed under his breath and put the card down with a snap on the surface of the little table. He picked his rum back up, considered draining it and ordering another—and chose, instead, to nurse it carefully. Had he been honest with himself—which he was not—he would have admitted he was afraid another envelope might arrive with a second drink.

Be no less bold than your dearest dream.

He frowned, the image of Lestrade passing through his mind. Bold Lestrade—outgoing, outspoken, laughing, clever, brave Lestrade. Lestrade who raced through dark alleys and over rooftops on his brother’s heels. Lestrade who managed to keep Sherlock under rein—insofar as anyone ever did, anyway. Lestrade who’d taken betrayal in his stride, moving calmly to divorce, and from divorce to solitary independence, all in the public eye of his curious, gossiping team. Lestrade...one of the few “ordinaries” Mycroft secretly found extraordinary. Exceptional.

Bold—a privateer as brave and venturesome as any of Sherlock’s beloved pirates, but on the side of Queen and country, with letters of marque rather than a skull and crossbones.

He frowned harder, his fingers tight around the mug. He pushed the outre, overblown notions aside. Ridiculous. He was an adult male in his forties; Lestrade over fifty. They were professional, sensible, responsible. Their lives—both their lives—demanded a certain type of valor. Not, however, anything so florid or gauche or melodramatic as his imagination had summoned up in reaction to that silly card. It was like some foolish girl sighing and mooning over the latest media idol…imagining scenes of swanny, lush romance that would almost certainly reduce the objects of their obsession to violent intestinal upheaval…or snide laughter.

He was a grey flannel man with a gray flannel life and a gray flannel heart. Even his soul, he thought, wore pinstripe and an Old School Tie (with a coordinating but _not_  a matched pocket square. Too precisely matched a pocket square was gauche, just like too torrid a fantasy of romance….). He could imagine no one less likely to endure the frivolous nonsense of romance than he—unless it was DI Lestrade. Lestrade had rolled love’s dice once and lost. He’d seen women and men dead in alleys at their lovers' hands—and all in the lying name of a lying love. What was Shakespeare’s line? Ah, yes. “Men have died and the worms have eaten them—but not for love.” If true love existed, no doubt it went about in sensible shoes and was in bed asleep by eight o’clock, to be ready for work the next morning. Romance might stay out late and swan around in dancing slippers, but romance was a false jade, and no doubt Lestrade would have nothing to do with her.

No. They were past all that.

Mycroft sighed. He looked at his mug, and at the last few sweet drops of buttered rum left in the bottom. The dregs…

He sipped the last of it, put the cup aside, and picked up the card again, frowning harder than ever.

What did this thing have to offer him, after all? It seduced with hopeless hope…

_I am old, I am old, I shall wear my trousers rolled. I shall count out my life in tea spoons. I hear the sirens singing, each to each—I think they do not sing for me._

Something in him broke, and bled, and wailed. No, no, no—even now, he was too young for that Prufrock life.

Venture you heart, and wager your pride—the victory lies in the daring. Be no less bold than your heart’s dearest dream.

What, he asked himself, would it take to be bold as his dearest, most secret dreams?

 

Lestrade strode in from the latest case at about three in the afternoon, his team ranged behind him, Sally at his side. He grinned like a happy hound. As many ways as he could regret his age, days like this only underlined the plusses. He was at home in his own skin, these days—like he hadn’t been since his wicked and misspent youth back before career, marriage, and creeping Thatcherist Toryism had knocked the stuffing out of his bohemian soul. Now, though—now he was a man come into his own, running at the head of his pack…

He shoved that bit aside, instead turning to toss out orders to Sally on how to handle the case and the team. Then he grabbed his own mug from its sacrosanct place in the department kitchenette, filled it with coffee that was fair if not brilliant, because he wasn’t putting up with his people drinking swill, and retreated into his office. He grabbed the contents of his in-basket and started sorting through the heap. He let the hot coffee scald away any weariness left after a hard day on site.

One-two-three-four-five damned interdepartmental memos: two were requests for shared access to evidence. He pulled up the necessary forms and OKed the requests, sending the approvals on their way with a few clicks. One was a complaint against one of his officers from a suspect they’d had in for questioning. Lestrade reviewed the pertinent recordings and filed forms, and concluded that the suspect wasn’t right enough to justify a reprimand—and not wrong enough to let the idiot DP off the hook. He wrote a carefully phrased letter to the suspect, printed it, signed it, placed it back in the manila interdepartmental envelope to go back to legal for review, just in case there was a twist he hadn’t yet seen in over twenty years on the force. The last two were plain, standard accounting issues, both having to do with establishing a clear paper trail on impounded evidence. He went back on line, filed out the reports, checking boxes and typing quick responses to queries, then saved, sent CCed copies, and printed out a hard copy for his own files.

Next in the pile made him pause, puzzled.

The envelope was a subtle, near-white silvery-mauve—a hint of dusty rose in the paper, no more, like the faint wash of color cast at sunset. It was good paper…at least, he thought it had to be good paper, because it looked nothing like the standard printer bond and manila and color-coded form paper he saw all day, or like the newsprint on the paper at the corner of his desk. It was smooth, and so well finished he couldn’t see any grain or texture but sleek matte….matte so smooth is was just at the very edge before it began to shine. His name was written across the front: written by hand, in a fluid, elegant script that suggested someone from another time, a civilization that was already tottering in 1914, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, and WWI began.

**Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade**

It was really quite nice, he thought, letting one finger trace carefully over the paper, for all the world as though he were Sherlock sucking in the slightest of clues. People seldom went the whole nine yards—title, name, hand written, all the bells and whistles. A fountain pen, too—he could see the liquid play as the nib had moved from letter to letter, and his fingertip found the very slightest roughness where the damp ink had ever so slightly raised the fine threads of the paper body.

He slipped it open, and found a piece of elegant matching stationery, the same haunted, spectral shade of almost-mauve. He raised the sheet, frowning. No—not perfume, he thought. More as though it had been written near a burning candle—a pure beeswax candle, smelling of honey. Something attractive, but so faint as to be almost imagined.

He opened it up and read the quick, sloping message.

**My Dear DI Lestrade,**

**I find myself challenged, all unprepared, to venture into the realm of possibilities. It suits me ill, I am afraid. I am not a pattern card for romance or daring. In spite of this…**

**Gregory…**

**If you would not feel too ridiculous or ill at ease, would you honor me with your company this Friday evening, at eight, at my flat at 293B Pall Mall, opposite the Diogenes Club? Clothing will be what I believe my assistant refers to as “dressy casual.” Dinner and drinks…**

**Yours in anticipation,**

**Mycroft Holmes**

Lestrade gave an uncertain bark of laughter.

Sherlock. It had to be Sherlock. The prat was up to something.

He touched the paper, and shook his head. No…no, he couldn’t quite see this as Sherlock. The man had the skill and persistence, he thought, to manage to forge the elegant, old-fashioned script, so very unlike his own hasty, cramped scrawl. And he did love to bait his brother. But to fake an invitation to what looked for all the world like a…what? Date seemed too slight a word. Assignation seemed too dramatic.

An invitation to an intimate dinner?

No. There was a meanness there, to both Mycroft and to Lestrade, that the detective couldn’t quite believe. Sherlock could be a cruel, stroppy little bastard, but it was the impulse of the moment, the observation made on the fly, the long-realized knowledge leaping off his tongue at the wrong moment that were Sherlock’s MO…not the sly, nasty game of setting people up only to humiliate them. Sherlock was more a manslaughter sort than a murder sort: his cruelties weren’t premeditated, for the most part.

He leaned back in his office chair, his cup in his hand, and swiveled until he could prop his heels on the corner of the desk. He studied the paper, frowning.

Mycroft Holmes. Oh, he knew Mycroft Holmes—England’s _eminence grise._ The power behind the throne. The one-man Shadow Government. Hell—Shadow Government? Shadow Foreign Office, Shadow Secret Service, Shadow Analyst.

Mycroft Holmes.

He shivered, thinking of the man. They’d never been close—but, conversely, ever since Lestrade had first been tapped to work with Sherlock, they’d never been precisely distant, either. He knew that tall, quaint figure—always collected, always poised, always _posed._ There was something valiant about the man: shyness and steel will, wary reserve and cut-throat pragmatism that granted no ground to anyone—not even to himself. A man with the mind to be a hermit saint or a reclusive academic, and he chose to be a spymaster: the spymaster supreme. Sometimes Lestrade wondered what that might tell him about the man, if he could only unravel it.

He looked at the softly glowing paper, so polished and elegant, so subtle in its color and scent. He looked at the sloping, sensitive line of script, almost sensuous in its line and flow.

Mycroft Holmes had asked him to dine, suggesting he himself was “challenged” to boldness.

Lestrade’s heart gave a thump, and thrill swept his blood. He snarled it down. He was over fifty. He was an experienced cop and a spy in his own right. He was sane and sensible and solid, and he’d already established the hard and unhappy way that there was no romance in him. Nor, if he was honest, could he quite believe there was romance in Mycroft. Not that he didn’t have infinite potential—but he’d chosen already, and that choice ruled out anything as non-essential as romance.

Still…

Maybe Mycroft hadn’t actually sent this, he thought. Maybe even if it wasn’t Sherlock, it was someone else. He should at least confirm. But—how to do so without risking embarrassing either himself, or Mycroft, or both.

He thought about it, then slipped his phone out. Carefully thinking it through, he typed.

_Got your invitation._

_And? MH_

Lestrade’s chest thundered again. So—Mycroft had sent it.

_Friday should be fine. Need me to bring anything?_

_Yourself? MH_

_D’oh. Besides that. Beer? Wine?_

_Beer would be good. MH_

Who knew Mycroft liked beer? But, then—the British Government, after all. Probably unpatriotic not to like beer.

_Can do that. Thank you for the invitation._

_No. Thank you for accepting. MH_

_Ok. Um. Got to go, now. Just wanted to thank you and confirm._

_Yes. I have to work, too. MH_

_Bye, then._

_Goodbye , DI Lestrade. I look forward to Friday with great anticipation. MH_

Lestrade clicked off the phone, slipped it into his pocket, and let the reality hit him. It hit hard, like a rolling breaker ice-cold from the North Sea. His skin broke out in goose bumps.

He picked up the invitation and studied it again.

_I find myself challenged, all unprepared, to venture into the realm of possibilities. It suits me ill, I am afraid. I am not a pattern card for romance or daring._

The realm of possibilities. Romance and daring.

Oh, God. What had he got himself into?

He closed his eyes, and found himself instantly imagining a tall figure leaning into his, and long, slim hands cradling his face.

Romance…

What the hell was he, DI Greg Lestrade, supposed to do with romance?

 

Mycroft paced his rooms for the fifteenth time in half an hour, eyes racing over every detail. Were the rooms clean? Comfortable? Did they express any message other than civil welcome from a civil man? Would his guest feel at ease? Might he, perhaps, even enjoy himself?

He’d almost restricted himself to his normal, cautious, limited hosting choices. When forced to entertain, he traditionally chose a stripped-down, spare elegance, lacking in any touch but the touch of clean simplicity. Every time he thought of a detail to add beyond that, his habits and his fears had tugged his heart, screaming for caution, begging that he not risk hurt…

He’d gone back to the little card over and over again.

_Be no less bold than your dearest dream._

He _was_ Mycroft Holmes: brilliant, sensible, mature, adult, and entirely stripped of sentiment, much less romance. What he dreamed, though…

On the dining table was a globe-shaped cut-glass bowl filled with fresh peonies—fat, sweet, sentimental herbaceous peonies in deep purple red, in soft dusty mauve, in pearly white flecked here and there with just a few crimson specks like blood-spatter.

On the music player was Coltrane, not Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with its cool, click-clock counterpoint. Simmering on the stove was a pot of slow-cooked sticky wings in a gooey wine sauce, with asparagus and sheets of fresh, pliable flat breads. He’d chosen a meal that demanded it be handled, touched, sucked down, lapped up, experienced in all the senses, rather than a far more standard strip steak, heap of neat steamed green beans, some roast beetroot, and a baked potato. Dessert was sliced fruit and seasoned sugar for dipping—pears held until they were poised between satiny softness and a little, lingering crispness.

Lestrade would dip and bite, lick the sugar from his lips, suck it from the pads of his fingers…

Thinking about it made Mycroft shiver.

He had dressed in a near-black dark navy jumper knit of raw, slubbed silk. Underneath, peeking out the v-neck, was a simple, crisp white button-down shirt open at the neck. His trousers were navy twill as dark as the jumper.

He stopped at the mirror and looked for the hundredth time. His chittered his dismay—also for the hundredth time. Going bald. Growing wrinkles. Getting old…

_I am old, I am old, I shall wear my trousers rolled…_

He looked like someone who could be touched, though—the jumper fluid and supple, with a near-shimmer and a deep matte darkness. His throat was open to view, the pulse throbbing visibly, his Adam’s apple dodging up and down as he swallowed down nerves.

The doorbell rang, and he jumped like a scalded cat. Then he collected himself, and forced himself to answer the door.

Lestrade looked like a pure and perfect knight.

 

Lestrade looked at his host—a tall shadow in deepest blue like indigo oblivion, his face pale and gleaming against stark white shirt linen and cobalt-black jumper. His eyes, which so often seemed grey, gleamed azure in harmony with his clothing. He licked his upper lip, the merest point of his tongue flickering out to brush the point of the bow then disappear.

“Come in,” he said to Lestrade, and stepped hesitantly to the side, letting his guest enter.

It was a beautiful room—frighteningly clean, but comfortable, even cozy. Stormy-hearted Coltrane played on the music player, the horn as hungry and yearning as it had ever been. There was a scent of sweet-tart sauce in the air, and below that a luscious trace of fresh-cut flowers. Looking around he found the sensual, disheveled peonies in their bowl on the table, heavy-headed and ravished, their petals all sweetly unchaste and on display.

He was glad he’d taken the time to choose carefully what he wore. He was gladder he’d chosen what he had, passing up sports jacket combos and natty jumpers that screamed “trying to pass as posh.” Instead he’d chosen things he loved—things he’d owned, sometimes for decades. A white-white peasant shirt from Greece, worn soft as chamois. The ties at the collar were untied so the entire V lay open, with a single modest gold chain just barely long enough to brush his clavicles and a trace of greying chest hair showing at the very lowest point of the V. A simple braided leather belt with a strangely shaped buckle made of reindeer antler. Black jeans and biker boots from back in the day when he’d still had a rice-rocket.  Clutched his his hand was an old, beaten, broken-in leather biker’s jacket—nothing gaudy, but indisputably the real thing. He’d been pleased he could still wear it.

He and Mycroft studied each other.

Something woke and started to prowl the room.

“So. Yeah.” Lestrade shifted his weight, feeling out of place and reckless and far too aware that every norm he was used to with Mycroft Holmes was gone—flown out the window, off on the wind. They were in new territory, now.

“Mmm. Yes.” Mycroft sounded as insecure. “Erm. I—we could sit in there,” he said, awkwardly, nodding toward the sitting room and the sofa. “Or I could serve dinner, if you’re hungry.”

“Beer,” Lestrade said, and pushed the carrier bag filled with bottles toward the other man in blind panic. “We could drink beer.”

Mycroft gave a tense giggle. “Yes. Yes, we could,” he said, and scurried out to the kitchen, racing back soon after with two open bottles. Then he said, “Oh, wait, I should have brought glasses.”

“Never mind,” Lestrade said, and plucked a bottle from his hands, downing half in a single go, cherishing the bitter flavor and the sharp, hoppy scent like crushed pine boughs, and the faint sweetness of the malt underneath. “Mmmm. May need another soon.”

Mycroft watched mesmerized, then tipped his head back and downed at least as much in one long, frantic pull. He came up gasping. “Oh. Yes. Very good.”

They stared at each other.

“Yeah. Living room. We can sit.”

“Yes. We can.”

The stumbled to the other room and sat on the sofa on opposing ends.

What am I doing? Lestrade thought. What have I walked into? What does he want?

What do I want?

 

“You know I’m gay?” Mycroft said, halfway through a completely confusing discussion of economic factors that had wandered through three identifiable nations and through a number of other points that could have been geographic or merely fiscal.

“Yeah, I think I’d heard that,” Lestrade said, leaving out the number of times Sherlock had tossed his idea of wit around over it—or the number of ways Mycroft’s overall demeanor set Lestrade’s gaydar pinging like a Geiger-counter snorting uncut uranium junk. “It’s all good. Bi, me, not that I’ve ever got much use out of the flip settings.”

“Just so you’re not unaware” Mycroft said.

“Yeah, better not to surprise people,” Lestrade agreed, quite sure there were three-year-olds who could demonstrate better conversational skills than he was managing tonight. “Some people get upset.”

“They do,” Mycroft said, nodding soberly. “I’ve seen it happen.”

“Me, too. Wife was miffed, even though what little ever happened happened before her.”

“Mmmm. Sherlock’s still sure I pick up rent-boys in Soho,” Mycroft said, with a sigh and a roll of his eyes. “And I don’t want to even tell you about Mummy.”

“Yeah,” Lestrade said. “Um—bottle’s empty.” He lifted his, sucked dry mere moments after it had first been opened.

“Mine, too,” Mycroft said, dangling his and looking at it in gloomy betrayal. “It’s supposed to last longer.”

“We’ll try again,” Lestrade said. “Maybe it will last longer if we’re not so nervous this time.” He stopped horrified by what he’d said.

Mycroft blushed crimson and fled to the kitchen.

When he came out he offered the bottle from a distance close to a full yard back.

“I don’t have cooties,” Lestrade said, reproachfully, as he took the bottle.

“No? I mean—no. Of course not.” Mycroft’s nose twitched, rabbit-like, and he blinked his eyes.

They stared at each other.

“What are we doing?” Lestrade said, softly. “What do you want?”

Mycroft stood, a deer in th headlights.

“Mycroft?”

The man drooped. “I got a message. It..suggested I live my life more as I wished. At least, I think that’s what it means. To _dare to be as bold as my dearest dream.”_ He swallowed. “You were the one thing I could really count as a dream. Or that demanded any boldness and daring. So—I’m doing you.”

“What?”

Mycroft gave a crooked, shamed smile. “Well, I was hoping to seduce you. But it appears it is just as I feared. I have no talent for it.” He thought about it. “And you. What were you thinking when you came over?”

Lestrade shook his head. “I have no idea. I forget. I knew—I’ll probably know again. But—you…”

Mycroft shrugged, a very Gallic, rueful gesture, without necessary words.

Lestrade grunted, nodded, frowned, and struggled to think. In the end, though, he had only one thing to say.

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Why the hell aren’ t you getting on with it?”

 

Mycroft blinked as he looked at the beautiful man. So clean, so lithe, so male, so calm. His breath staggered and shook. “I’m not particularly good at romance,” he said, paralyzed by fear.

Lestrade’s eyes had gone dark and intense, but his voice was light and shivery. “Oh, just give it your best shot. The old college try. You’re British— _just show willing_ , for God’s sake.”

Mycroft snorted, caught off-guard by the humor of the statement. “You’re setting the bar rather low, you know. As the unfortunate recipient of my efforts you might want to urge me to greater levels of proficiency.”

“What proficiency?” Lestrade growled. “You’re not doing anything.”

Mycroft cocked his head, studying his guest.

Lestrade wanted him to try.

He _wanted_ him to try!

Well…

In that case….

“You’re sure?”

“For fuck’s sake, Mike, I swear, if you don’t…”

“Now, now. No need to get in a pelter,” Mycroft said, then, more hesitantly, he said, “I would like to be the sort of man who can do this,” and stepped close, sitting on the sofa as near Lestrade as he could. He cradled Lestrade’s jaw in both palms, then tipped his head back to gain access to the tender, white skin barely peppered with the faint black and white glints of stubble. He leaned in and kissed lightly at the turn of Lestrade’s jaw, where the pulse beat in his jugular.

Lestrade’s blood thundered faster—Mycroft could feel the throbbing swell under his softly exploring lips. He continued. His brain muttered over and over, “I am old, I am old, I will wear my trousers rolled,” but it was an empty litany—all his mind actually noted was the scent of shaving foam and soap and aftershave, and the tiny scrape of barely existent stubble, and the plush texture of tender skin, and the thrum-thrum-thrum of Lestrade’s rioting pulse.

He slipped his hands over Lestrade’s arms, and found himself grabbed at the waist and pulled close.

They were silent for long minutes. Somewhere in there Lestrade muttered one, and only one practical, sensible phrase—and only a phrase.

“The dinner?”

“It can hold,” Mycroft gasped, and worked his hands under the soft, worn Greek shirt just as Lestrade began to stroke his own body in its cobolt silk, caressing Mycroft like a big cat.

“Why” Mycroft said, glorying in it.

“Because you asked me, you prat.”

“Oh. That’s all?”

“You should have asked years ago.”

“Oh.”

They took their time. They stretched it out. They said little in words, and yet authored entire Russian novels in touch and gesture.

“Why me?” Lestrade managed, as they rode each other homeward.

“Because I have no dearer dream,” Mycroft said…and crested, and shattered, and fell at last.

 

Later he showed the little card to Lestrade, and they took guesses who had sent it. They never found out, and it remained a mystery their whole lives after.

They didn’t mind.

 

 

 


End file.
